At the age of 27, I became one of the youngest—perhaps, the youngest—career fire chief in the state of Indiana. To say that I was a little intimidated is an understatement. Having several of my previous mentors of the fairly small department (28 volunteer firefighters, one paid/career chief) now calling me, “Chief,” was extremely awkward, too. Regardless, I hit the ground running to prove that I could succeed in the position and better our department and our community. I had the pride, passion, drive, and, most importantly, the love of the department and of the fire service.
A past chief told me, “A man does not make a position; the position makes the man,” and I must say that statement is correct. I grew tremendously and learned a lot over the course of the next 15 years. We made big changes and transitions and had many noteworthy accomplishments. We tripled our budget, purchased several new apparatus, built a training and fitness center, and increased staffing to one full-time chief, three full-time firefighters, 12 part-time firefighters and 36 volunteers. I gained tremendous support from members and staff. I started to feel like a successful leader.
Letting pride obscure the truth
Around this time, while preparing for a budget meeting with our city council, clerk-treasurer and mayor, I was smacked in the face with reality: I had failed the department, the political officials and the community.
For 15 years, I had no problem publicizing all of the positives and successes of the department and its members. I continually raved to the officials about how well that the department was doing, because heaven forbid I mention anything negative and make us look bad.
I now realized that I created a false culture/image in our community, from elected officials to the citizens. In their minds, everything was great, the volunteer fire service was thriving (not crumbling), our volunteer members were extremely active, and we had no reason to change anything from the way that it was done for years. None of this was true.
Once I noticed this major failure on my part, I sucked it up and went into the budget meeting and admitted that, unknowingly, I failed everyone. I told them that it was like being a business owner: I didn’t want to tell the public about failures and shortfalls because of the vested pride and ownership.
I shared with the attendees of the meeting all of the department’s major issues, including: the current roster of volunteers was burnt out; the roster lacked the business owners/public and elected officials/community leaders that it once included; and members’ perspective was changing from “what can I do for my community” to “what can my community do for me.”
I explained what it took to be a firefighter 20 years ago, with the state 24-hour mandatory firefighter training, and what it took today—nearly 240 hours of trainings. I provided an overwhelming amount of graphs and charts to bring them up to date with the state of the department.
I shared that I felt that my lack of transparency would be comparable to one of my members doing an apparatus check and finding a pump to be nonfunctional but not telling anyone and just hoping that a disaster didn’t occur. Even though the pump malfunction wasn’t the firefighter’s fault, that individual didn’t want to upset the apple cart and take the chance of looking bad.
Honesty no matter what
At the end of the meeting, I shared with the officials that I understood that there wasn’t a magic pot of money that they kept hidden to fix these problems. However, now, they could put the problems on their list of priorities. The biggest thing was, if or when something bad happened, nobody could say, “We didn’t know.”
At the end of my presentation, I received applause from the officials, and I realized that I wasn’t in trouble. I was being praised for sharing the bad news.
From that point, I decided that this failure of mine had to be shared with other new fire chiefs. I might not have received a bigger lesson in my career: Never let your pride, vision and successes get in the way of the reality of failures, shortfalls and everyday changes in society. Share the negatives, so when the time comes that you need help, it’s a level playing field, with everyone on the same team.
